Justice and the Genesis of War

Studies of the causes of war generally presuppose a "realist" account of motivation: when statesmen choose to wage war, they do so for purposes of self-preservation or self-aggrandizement. In this book, however, David Welch argues that humans are motivated by normative concerns, the pursuit of which may result in behavior inconsistent with self-interest. He examines the effect of one particular type of normative motivation - the justice motive - in the outbreak of the five Great Power wars: the Crimean War, the Franco-Prussian War, World War I, World War II, and the Falklands War. Realist theory would suggest that these wars would be among the least likely to be influenced by considerations other than power and interest, but the author demonstrates that the justice motive played an important role in the genesis of war, and that its neglect by theorists of international politics is a major oversight. Since states are often led to war by the perceived demands of justice, Welch concludes the book by examining the meaning of justice across borders with an eye to clarifying its relationship to international order. He argues that there is room for creative institution-building in the pursuit of a just world order, but that the current gap between empirical and normative political science makes progress toward this goal difficult.